Malachi 3:1-4
The Rev. Dr. Robert S. Langworthy, preaching
December 8, 2024
Reflecting on the doctrine of “original sin”, Seminary Professor Margaret Shuster quoted the reply of philosopher/theologian G.K. Chesterton to a reporter who asked him: “What’s wrong with this world?” Chesterton did not right away speak of systemic injustice, environmental degradation, broken moral compasses, corrupt politicians, or rampant crime. He answered, “What’s wrong with this world? First off, I am!”
I am the problem, and it is my foremost responsibility to get the problem that I am fixed.
Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr once quipped that original sin, or the idea that each of us starts out a sinner and remains one throughout our life, is the only Christian doctrine that is empirically verified.
It’s not that we’re all bad. It’s just that we’re not all good. There are opposing forces at war within us. As the poet Carl Sandburg put it, “There is in me an eagle that wants to soar, and a hippopotamus that wants to wallow in the mud.” This remains true even for those of us to whom God has given a new heart on which He’s written His law. That’s why the Apostle Paul laments in Romans 7, “I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate…I delight in the law of God in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind, making me captive to…sin.”
Those on whom God has done cardiac surgery are embarked on a life-long process of bringing every part of their being in line with their transformed heart. One day at a time, we who were once totally messed-up take the next step in becoming a little less messed up. We’re still sinners, just sinners in recovery, still growing in righteousness.
But we make no progress in this process of transformation apart from help from beyond us, from outside the realm of the merely natural and human. Yes, we exercise willpower to say No to many a sin, but way too often our willpower meets more than its match with certain temptations. Consider how helpless some of us are before the scent of cinnamon rolls at the mall. And, yes, we try to bear in mind that doing the right thing is always what’s in our best interest; but in the heat of the moment, especially when fighting the momentum of a long-entrenched habit, we lose our head and act irrationally. Consider how, according to John Hopkins research, 90% of cardiac bypass patients, despite knowing that eating better and exercising more regularly will greatly increase their health and longevity, show no change in their lifestyle two years after surgery.
In a class at Harvard psychiatrist Robert Coles told about a colleague who confessed to him, “I’ve been doing therapy with a man for 15 years. He’s still as angry, self-centered and mean as the first day he walked into my office. The only difference is that now he knows why.” Coles then noted that, though his colleague succeeded in explaining to his patient his dysfunction, he failed to enable the man to change. Coles then asked, “Could we conclude that what this man needed wasn’t just information but transformation? But is transformation possible for human beings?”
The Bible tells us that all things are possible with God, and that heavenly help from outside the human realm can enable us to change beyond our capacity to do so on our own.
The prophet Malachi brought God’s word to God’s people after they’d returned home from their Babylonian exile and began to rebuild the temple in Jerusalem. But both priests and everyday folks had grown disillusioned with God and disconnected from God. They’d lost any sense of His presence and become lax in their spiritual practices. Yet, Malachi brought to those undeserving folks a beautiful promise: God would of His own initiative come again to them. “But who,” Malachi wonders, “can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears?” Will not this holy God incinerate them in righteous judgment? No, He will “sit” watchful and careful over them like a refiner purifying his precious silver with fiery heat until He can see his face reflected in the metal, or like a garment maker cleansing his stained wool in bleach until it is as white as freshly fallen snow. God means to transform His too hippopotamus-like people, so that they become less the problem and more God’s pride and joy who “present offerings to the Lord in righteousness.”
Under our own power we can only go so far in leaving behind our inner hippopotamus and letting loose the eagle within us; but we can day after day welcome the refining and purifying God who alone can complete the transformation He began in us when He gave us a new heart. As we pray, attend services and walk in God’s will, we give Him opportunity to extract out of us more and more of our lingering sinfulness and to inject into us more and more of His righteousness.
This sanctification of us is an accomplishment of God’s grace, and thus may take place when we least expect it or merit it, as it did for Claremont Graduate School professor Mary Poplin. Dr. Poplin was volunteering with Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity. She’d been assigned the care of a five-month-old boy who was deformed, constantly sick, and often miserable. She always tried to pass on the job of feeding him to someone else, but one day there was no one else. Once she’d gotten his bottle down him, she got up to get home. As she headed out the door she took one last quick look-around, and noticed the undigested formula that was dripping out of her baby’s bassinette. He had thrown up what appeared to be the entire eight-ounce bottle. She looked for someone to take care of it, but no one was available. So, she decided, with no little struggle, to stay and clean things up. She lifted him out of his bassinette, held him against her shoulder and gathered the dirty sheets together to wipe up the mess. As she cleaned, she heard a muffled convulsive sobbing from the tiny child in her arms; and, glancing down at him, she saw the tears pouring out of his eyes. She writes, “As I looked at him, I saw in myself what Jeremiah called the ‘desperate wickedness of the human heart’. I realized I had approached this task with a spirit of resistance and impatience. I had thought very little, if at all, about this child and his needs.” So, after throwing the sheets into the laundry pile, she bathed his little misshapen body, dressed him in clean clothes, hugged him, rocked him and prayed over him until he drifted off to sleep.
Dr. Poplin says his sobbing showed her her own sinfulness. It moved her to repent and to ask God to forgive and change her; and, as she gazed into his eyes and cooed him to sleep, she says, “I could feel Christ’s work inside my spirit just as surely as if he were sitting beside me.”
The God who loves us comes from beyond us to be beside us. He comes to refine and purify us. He comes to transform us, so that we are not just the problem but more and more the embodiment of the grace that brings hope to this world inhabited by nothing but broken and sinful people like us!
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